The Problem: Two Languages, Opposite Word Order
Classical Chinese (漢文, kanbun) is Subject–Verb–Object: 「我愛汝」 means 'I love you' in that order. Classical Japanese is Subject–Object–Verb: the same idea is 「我汝ヲ愛ス」. When Japanese scholars received the Chinese Confucian and Buddhist canon, they faced a dilemma: how to read it aloud in intelligible Japanese without translating it into a separate Japanese text. Their solution was a set of annotations that supplied Japanese readings and marked a different reading order.
レ点 — The Simplest Mark
The レ点 (re-ten) looks like the katakana レ and is placed at the lower-left corner of a character. It means: 'read the next character first, then come back here.' If 読書 ('read books') has a レ point on 読, you read 書 first, then 読 — giving the SOV reading 書ヲ読ム ('books [object] read'). A single tiny mark reverses two adjacent characters.
一二点 and 上下点 — Multi-Level Reordering
For longer inversions — where the return jump reaches back two or more characters, past at least one character in between — scholars used 一二点 (ichi-ni-ten): the numerals 一, 二, 三 written beside characters to number the return. You read straight down the line, passing over the character marked 二; when you reach the character marked 一 you read it, then jump back up to 二. In 「登二泰山一」 you read 泰, then 山, then 登 — 'climb Mount Tai' comes out as 泰山に登る. For even deeper inversions, 上下点 (jō-ge-ten) and 甲乙点 (kō-otsu-ten) were added. In principle, any SVO phrase — no matter how embedded — can be rerouted to SOV purely through these marks, without touching the original text.
Regional Comparisons and Continued Use
Chinese texts were read throughout the Sinosphere — in Korea (as 한문, hanmun), in Vietnam (as chữ Hán), in Ryūkyū, in Manchuria. Every culture felt the SVO/SOV or SVO/topic-prominent mismatch. Korea did the same thing on the page. Goryeo-period 석독구결 (釋讀口訣 seokdok gugyeol, also called 역독구결 'reverse-reading gugyeol'), attested from the 11th century and either written in ink or scratched into the paper with an inkless stylus (角筆), marked both the native Korean word to substitute and the order in which to jump back through the line. Similar return-reading experiments are attested for Khitan and Uyghur. Japan differs in the continuous use of the system. In Korea, seokdok gugyeol gave way to 순독구결 (順讀口訣), which reads straight through in the Chinese order; Japan's 返り点 were standardised, printed alongside the text, and taught continuously into the modern era, so that 漢文訓読 (kanbun kundoku) still lets a scholar read the original unchanged Chinese text aloud in natural Japanese today.
The Pedagogical Legacy
Until the Meiji era (1868+) and well into the 20th century, kanbun literacy was the mark of a Japanese educated person. Samurai, monks, scholars, and bureaucrats all drilled 返り点 parsing from childhood. The Meiji government debated abolishing kanbun entirely in favor of pure Japanese or even Romanized script. They did not. Even today, kanbun appears in Japanese high school curricula, and the ability to parse a phrase like 「不亦楽乎」 (mata tanoshikarazu ya — 'is that not also a joy?') using レ点 is tested in the national university entrance exam.
Influence on Written Japanese
Kanbun remains visible in the formal written register of modern Japanese. Formal legal Japanese, newspaper editorials, and Buddhist scriptures retain Sino-Japanese vocabulary and inverted constructions that descend directly from 漢文訓読 practice. When a Japanese politician says 「努力セザルベカラズ」 ('one must not fail to make effort'), the double negative and nominalization are kanbun structures alive in the 21st century. The conventions associated with 返り点 also influenced the syntax of modern written Japanese.